Backup

Do you have control of your Office 365 data? Do you have access to all the items you need? The knee-jerk reaction is typically, “Of course I do,” or “Microsoft takes care of it all.” But if you really think about it — are you sure? Microsoft takes care of quite a bit, and provides a great service for their customers. However, Microsoft’s primary focus is on managing the Office 365 infrastructure and maintaining uptime to your users. They are empowering YOU with the responsibility of your data. The misconception that Microsoft fully backs up your data on your behalf is quite common, and without a shift in mindset, could have damaging repercussions when this responsibility is left unattended. Ultimately, you need to ensure you have access to, and control over, your Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business data.

The misunderstanding falls between Microsoft’s perceived responsibility and the user’s actual responsibility of protection and long-term retention of their Office 365 data. The backup and recoverability that Microsoft provides and what users assume they are getting are often different. Meaning, aside from the standard precautions Office 365 has in place, you may need to re-assess the level of control you have of your data and how much access you truly have to it.

Microsoft Office 365 offers geo redundancy, which is often mistaken for backup. Backup takes place when a historical copy of data is made and then stored in another location. However, it is even more important that you have direct access to and control over that backup. So if data is lost, accidentally deleted or maliciously attacked, for example — you can quickly recover. Geo redundancy, on the other hand, protects against site or hardware failure, so if there is an infrastructure crash or outage, your users will remain productive and often oblivious to these underlying issues.

6 reasons why backing up Office 365 is critical:

Accidental Deletion

Retention policy gaps and confusion

Internal security threats

External security threats

Legal and compliance requirements

Managing hybrid deployments

Go ahead and take a closer look. There are security gaps you may not have been aware of before. You already made a smart business decision by deploying Microsoft Office 365, now find a backup solution that offers you both complete access and complete control of your Office 365 data and avoid the unnecessary risks of data loss. To learn more, reach out to your Keller Schroeder Select Account Manager.

No? Why Not? Using Veeam & Azure, quickly and easily create a cloud off-site backup, that is cost efficient & scalable based on your needs. Configure Veeam to backup the most critical data for DR, or provide long-term retention using cost-effective cloud storage. Azure charges are based on actual used capacity. Unlike other cloud offerings or on-premises equipment, this solution provides a true consumption model, allowing you to shrink or grow the amount of data being backed up to more effectively manage costs.

Question 2 : Does it meet the 3-2-1 rule?

The “Golden Rule” of backup. The 3-2-1 rule states having three copies of your data – 2 on different media, and 1 copy offsite. We highly recommend Veeam integrated snapshots on Nimble Storage, copied to a Cisco UCS backup appliance, & then copied off-site to Azure.

Question 3 : Are you able to backup Office 365 data?

You need to securely backup Office 365 email data back to your environment for a variety of reasons; to follow the 3-2-1 Rule of backup, to facilitate eDiscovery, and to meet internal policies and compliance requirements. The most important reason being the peace-of-mind that comes from knowing you will be able to restore your users’ data when needed!

With Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, you can retrieve Office 365 Exchange Online mailbox items (email, calendar, and contacts) from a cloud-based instance of Office 365 and uniquely back up this mailbox data into the same format that Microsoft Exchange uses natively — an archive database based on Extensible Storage Engine (ESE), also known as the Jet Blue database.

As we continue growing our geographic service area, Keller Schroeder is excited to take our highly successful series of lunch and learn events on the road. During each TechSpot event, our team and vendor partners work together to shine the spotlight on specific technologies. The goal is to provide valuable education on ways our current and future clients can improve the performance of their IT environments in a fun and relaxing atmosphere. Each attendee enjoys a free lunch, receives a free gift for attending, and is registered to win some great prizes.

Veeam Availability Suite version 9 was officially released to the public on January 12th, 2016, after an early release in December to manufacturers and partners. Veeam Availability Suite combines the industry-leading backup, restore and replication capabilities of Veeam Backup & Replication with the advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning functionality of Veeam ONE. This article will focus on the new features available in Veeam Backup & Replication. Below is a list of some of the major new features in the latest software release.

Scale-Out Backup Repository – Scale-Out Backup Repository is perhaps the most significant new feature of Veeam Backup & Replication v9 and will provide the greatest benefit to many businesses. This feature allows multiple disk repositories from any backup target supported by Veeam to be grouped into a single pool for maximum scale-out capabilities. Backup targets can be Windows or Linux servers with local or direct attached storage, or even NAS or SAN storage volumes with compression and/or deduplication technologies. Any of these various sources can now be combined into one big backup destination pool for Veeam backups. This not only benefits scale-out for backups, but also allows new storage sources to be added and old storage sources to be removed on the fly over time, without disrupting backup operations. Also, the combination of multiple disk sources can dramatically improve backup performance.

Per-VM Backup Chains – Per-VM backup chains will allow a single backup job, which in v8 was a single-threaded task, to become a multi-threaded task. For example, a backup job with 20 VMs can now create 20 threads on the underlying storage. This will result in faster backup completion times by allowing each disk resource to reach its full performance level. This feature in combination with the Scale-Out Repository feature will greatly improve backup performance.

Stand-alone Console – The previous Veeam versions could only be managed by directly accessing the Veeam management server via RDP or console and opening the local client that was installed as part of the Veeam server installation. In the new Veeam Backup & Replication v9, there is now a separate stand-alone thick client that can be installed on any workstation or server, providing more convenient & secure access to Veeam management.

Storage Snapshot Integration with EMC – Veeam Backup & Replication v9 has also added the ability to leverage storage based snapshots from EMC storage, just as it has done in previous versions with HP & NetApp storage. These storage snapshots can be accessed from “Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots”. Just like Veeam’s other client specific Explorer utilities (Exchange, SQL, Oracle, etc.), the snapshot backups can be searched and item level data can be recovered directly from the Veeam Explorer GUI.

Direct Backup from Network File System (NFS) – Veeam Backup & Replication v9 can now directly backup any NFS storage target attached to a vSphere ESXi host. This new version of Veeam will also support the NFS 4.1 protocol on vSphere 6. This is a great additional feature, as until now, only select vendor’s NFS storage targets were supported.

Is your business still backing up a VMware or Hyper-V environment using traditional physical backup software? Has your business recently made the transition from physical infrastructure to a VMware or Hyper-V virtualized environment, and are now looking to take further advantage of server virtualization? Or are your backups failing to meet RPO & RTO targets? If any of these scenarios are true of your business, now is a great time to look into Veeam, and the Veeam Availability Suite.

The Veeam Availability Suite combines 2 great products: Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE.Veeam Backup & Replication is the ideal replacement for your legacy backup; Veeam was built from the beginning for virtualized environments. This allows for recovery of failed VMs in as little as 2 minutes, near-continuous data protection and replication, and 15 minute RTO & RPOs. Veeam backups include in-line deduplication, compression, and changed-block tracking (CBT), greatly reducing capacity requirements. The best part – no backup agents on your VMs!

Veeam ONE is a full-featured monitoring, reporting, and capacity planning tool for VMware or Hyper-V virtualized environments. It provides 24×7 real-time monitoring and alarming of performance and backup issues. The software comes configured with 200+ pre-set alarms, but is fully customizable based on your environment. The advanced capacity planning allows for “what-if?” analysis and resource reservation configuration.

Interested in trying out Veeam, but not ready to fully commit? Check out the completely FREE versions: Veeam Backup Free Edition and Veeam ONE Free Edition. Both offer a subset of the functionality included in the fully licensed versions, including full VM backups, single item recovery, and 7 days of performance and capacity metrics from Veeam ONE Free Edition.